I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.
CLAUDETTE COLVINAs long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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A lot has changed since I grew up, but there’s still a long way to go. I don’t think we can move forward with Donald Trump as the president. There’s a disconnect there. We don’t want to regress, we want progress.
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There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.
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That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.
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I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.
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We were churchgoing people.
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I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.
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I’ve always told my children that once they go out into the world, they must have two heads and two minds: one to keep grounded, the other to deal with corporate America.
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Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all.
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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.
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I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.
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I’d like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.
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A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.
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I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.
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I was ostracized by my community.
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